Hands-on Rhetoric, Teaching & Craft in a Digitized World

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Goats and New Media

In the weaving studio yesterday I overheard someone discussing her next project, a rug she began some time ago with the spun wool of an angora goat that has since died. She has been searching her herd for just the right goat, whose donation of hue and texture will complement–but cannot duplicate–the existing yarn.

Dying the wool won’t make them match; each goat’s wool is distinctive.

I smiled as I heard all this. A palette of goats.

And I found myself pondering what other sorts of materials and resources exist that just haven’t been on my radar. And what might I do with them? How might they speak differently than other materials I’ve used. Their conventional symbolisms of course are part of their rhetoricity. A sentence woven into bamboo cloth (something I’ve just completed, actually) communicates contextually and visually and culturally differently than the same sentence squeezed through a label maker or typed onto a blog.

Nothing new there.

But there’s something exhilarating about recognizing the collaborative potential of livestock for the very first time.